You can’t truly appreciate the impact of the announcement today of the deaths of Farrah Fawcett (after a long bout with cancer) and Michael Jackson (reportedly of cardiac arrest) unless you remember when Farrah had an extra surname courtesy of the Six-Million-Dollar Man and Michael was a character on a Saturday morning cartoon.

Fawcett and Jackson, both fueled by sadness and challenges in their respective lives that we may never fully grasp, morphed into cartoon parodies of their younger selves, easy fodder for media jibes.

But when I was an adolescent they were everything to me and to most of the kids I knew.

I’ve confessed many times in print my childhood devotion to the former Farrah Fawcett-Majors. Her leap to stardom as a bra-less, breathy TV detective and sporty wife of the bionic man, Lee Majors, impressed me as the height of American achievement—so much so that when my elementary school teacher asked in whose footsteps I would most like to follow I unabashedly cited Charlie’s most famous angel in front of a class of howling third-graders. (Hey, I wanted to say, doesn’t your big brother have her poster on his wall? What’s the big joke here?)

Watching Farrah’s decline hasn’t been fun but it didn’t stop me from very recently purchasing a copy of Between Two Women, a relatively unsung TV-movie in which she becomes the reluctant-cum-compassionate caretaker for ailing mother-in-law Colleen Dewhurst (Dewhurst’s son, Michael Nouri, died early in the film, which left Farrah responsible for plucking the chin hairs off a bed-ridden Colleen. It sounds like a riot, I know, but Dewhurst won an Emmy so somebody else evidently took it seriously.) Farrah remained a troubled trouper I hoped could find another niche for herself, although all she ever seemed to find was more plastic surgery (thanks, L.A.).

Michael—and he will always be Michael and not Wacko Jacko or whatever else he later got labeled—went from being the sunny, gifted lead singer of the Jackson 5 (with whom he shared the aforementioned Saturday morning spotlight) into an artist whose solo forays into disco and R&B made Friday nights at the roller-skating rink a much better place for me to be. I still have my 45 of "Rock With You."

To hear Michael mocked throughout the years bothered me more than the sexist, silly jabs at Farrah because, although I have no proof whatsoever, it always seemed very clear to me that he was the product of an unfathomably awful childhood. I often could barely get home from grade school without bursting into tears over my day’s supposed hardships; Michael Jackson, meanwhile, was busy supporting his entire extended family on his protean, preternatural talents.

Both of these people brought me a great deal of happiness and that’s not something I can laugh off. May they rest in peace.

And if you can watch the following footage of a very young Michael—performing with an adult’s ecstatic sense of yearning on one of those deliriously canned ’70s TV specials (dig Cosby with the Smothers brother)—without even a small tear forming in the corner of your eye, well, keep it to yourself: